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Hezbollah - the Party of God - is the militant Shiite political movement that dominates Lebanese politics.

Later in the week Aysha called me to report back on the interview.

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“Oh, it was nothing,” said Aysha, laughing. “They just wanted to know if you were a Mossad agent.”

Hezbollah, Aysha told me, had done their homework. They knew my father’s name, my phone number, where I was born, my wife’s name, even where we had met.

“Don’t worry, I told them your whole life story. They don’t think you’re a Mossad agent, but they’ll still be listening to your phone calls for a while.”

Needless to say, no one from Hezbollah ever came knocking on my door, but soon after Aysha was sitting behind bars on trumped-up weapons smuggling charges.

In reality he was just doing his job.

A few months later I was talking to Nadim Ladki, the editor-in-chief of Beirut’s English-language newspaper The Daily Star.

“Oh, we’re very interested in investigative reporting here, we cover everything,” said Ladki. “But, you know, there are some red lines.”

In Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Middle East, failing to observe those red lines can get you killed.

Just a few hundred metres from where we were sitting were the offices of the Arabic language newspaper Al-Nahar, which overlooks Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square. Displayed on the outside of building is the portrait of one of two Al-Nahar journalists assassinated in 2005 for openly criticising the regime of Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad.

When Hosni Mubarak was forced out as Egypt’s president in 2011, I found myself on the streets of Cairo on the wrong side of a military curfew.

The soldiers who arrested me and three other journalists first bound our hands and then blindfolded us before carting us off to some military compound somewhere on the outskirts of the city.

The soldiers were polite, but not knowing where we were going was a little disconcerting. When they freed us a few hours later it seemed like Egypt was definitely changing for the better.

How wrong we were.

Jason Koutsoukis was Fairfax's Middle East correspondent from 2008 to 2011. He is currently Fairfax's South Asia Correspondent.